Civil War In Ukraine - They Are Killing The Police

It's better than having a single country continuously unstable....

 

Stop believing Erdogan's 'New Ottoman' propaganda about the Crimea being Muslim. The Eastern part of Ukraine and the Crimea consists predominantly of Russian Orthodox Christians. The only Muslims are the jihadists from Syria sent into Kiev to cause anarchy with the hope a war will break out and Turkey can get its troops into the Crimea. Well they had the same hopes with Syria, so they better think again because the Russian ships are on high alert.

 

You've addressed only one issue which the Ukranians are protesting against. What about his suspension of the 2010 constitution which curtailed the president's power? What about the anti-protest laws passed on 16 January 2014?
The first casualties were two peaceful protesters on 22 January. Putin offered the financial incentive in December, after the protests had started. Isn't that coercion as well? Yanukovych himself stated that he had been pressured by the Russia to distance his country from the EU. Ukraine has been negotiating with the EU since the 90s, Yanukovich has single-handedly and unexpectedly changed his country's entire strategic policy without even asking for his voters' opinion. Imagine if all of a sudden Obama tried to close the US border with Canada and enter into some kind of a union with Mexico without even batting an eyelash.

What atrocities? The crimes involved were documented. You can actually see Berkut members beating up and shooting at the protesters. Again, initial protests were peaceful. Up until 18 February all the victims killed were protesters.

How do you know that? Are you sure all those people are the very same who started the protests?

 

Indeed. The drunk incompetent, Yeltsin, who sold the nation off to the oligarchs and mafia and was adored by the West, was detested domestically, while Putin is respected domestically for defending Russian interests (illustrated by approval ratings that would make Obama blush), but hated in the West.

 

it's better to keep out russian stooges that try dominate ukranians

 

Out of curiosity, did you support the independence of Kosovo?

 

That's the problem. The Western part of Ukraine does not want the country to separate, instead it wants to impose its own wants and desires on the Eastern part. I have no doubt the E.U. is behind it. I do know that the Eastern half has more fertile soil and is much more industrialized than the Western part, which might be what is causing the resentment. But this has always been true even under the Russian Empire. At that time it was the wealth of Russia in comparison to the poverty in the West that had the Jews running in when Poland was annexed, so the same probably held true for Ukraine.

I read something today which may or may not be true, since the source tends to spin things. The article said that Monsanto wanted to use the land in the West of Ukraine for its GMO wheat, and Yanukovich wouldn't allow it. If true, and I don't know if it is, Monsanto might have been stopped for the same reasons other E.U. nations have stopped the GMO's. I know that Russia is considering stopping the GMO's as well. This might be one of the reasons the U.S. is so upset with Yanukovich. ..among other things of course.

 

i was neutral

the problem is that stalin murdered multitudes of ukranians

let's see that source

 

I think these are potentially really dangerous times. Some commentators, for instance, are drawing historical parallels with the build up to WW1.

 

I honestly don't know what to say to all this, but I cannot shrug of the feeling that all this could have been resolved much more peacefully several weeks ago. The video on BBC's page tells me one thing: the people in Ukraine are angry. They should be able to express their thoughts and opinions without being shot at by those who are meant to protect them. If only there weren't so many hardliners on both sides.

And once again, you cannot claim the protesters are being payed be the western governments. That is a potential excuse which could be used in the future against people who tried to express their grievances against governments in a peaceful manner.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26280710

 

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-february-19-2014/jason-jones-live-from-sochi-ish---better-off-red

 

The people of Ukraine want freedom and they deserve it.

 

Weren't the anti protest laws put in when the protesters began attacking the police with fires and taking over public buildings? Would the U.S. have done differently? Why the double standards? Aren't they both sovereign nations?

So if you decided to quit your job for a higher paying one and your boss offers you more money to stay, you would consider that coercion? I don't, I would consider it incentive.

Russia has given Ukraine some very favorable trade agreements, which it cannot continue if Ukraine joins the E.U., because then products from the E.U. would be entering Russia through those favored nation agreements. Russia was willing to have talks with the E.U. over it, but the E.U. refused. Also Ukraine owes Russia a great deal of money, and the military industries in Eastern Ukraine are from the time of the Soviet Union, wouldn't they have to be moved and paid for by Ukraine? Do you really expect Russia to hand over all these things to the E.U. free of charge? Would you? I mean come on be realistic. Yanukovych asked the E.U. to cover the costs and they refused. I guess they felt encouraging protests were cheaper, and the Western Ukrainians fell for it...at the cost of their lives it seems.

Yanokovich has no other choice since the nation is ready to go bankrupt. If the people used their brains, and stopped living in a dream world they would have realized it. The problem is that the century old Catholic hatreds in the Western part of Ukraine towards the Orthodox Russians are so ingrained that they can't face reality.

Obviously you didn't see the videos of the police being set on fire when the protests began. There have been videos continuously on Russia Today. The one with the naked man that was shown on the BBC, was proven to be a fake when it turned out that the person shown at the end of the video had left the police force months before the riots started. The video was made up by a company working for Julia Tymochenko and yet in typical BBC fashion, they didn't have the decency to retract what they wrote. But then they never do.

If you went on to Russia Today, you would have seen with your own eyes what was going in Kiev right from the beginning... and videos do not lie. Here are two out of many:

http://rt.com/news/ukraine-rioters-beat-police-202/

http://rt.com/news/ukraine-clashes-protest-law-858/

 

yes, we most certainly would have

we do a lot of things differently than in putin's russia

 

I've seen the videos. There are many of them showing both the police and the protesters being beaten up. Showing just one version of events does not mean the other events did not occur.

[video=youtube;0y7oSQJLenM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y7oSQJLenM[/video]

[video=youtube;4EH4KRGzhhQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EH4KRGzhhQ[/video]

Don't get me wrong, I try to stay informed, gather information from various sources and I have been observing these protest/ riots/ acts of terrorism or whatever you want to call them for a month now. Again, I do not support the violence, but I simply think that the people have had enough. When you get beaten up for standing in a group and chanting various slogans you don't take kindly to that. Berkut is known for employing "thugish" men who get pumped up whenever there's an opportunity for some head bashing.

Could you perhaps provide any sources for that?

Wait, why would Ukraine have to come to terms with its harsh reality when they should aspire and work towards something more? At the very least you shouldn't get beaten up for expressing your opinion in public. And Yanukovych has no choice? It's not like he's the king of the nation. He can listen to his nation's wishes, he can compromise, he can even resign. But what he cannot do is send Berkut at demonstrators and ban all protests with his infamous anti-protest law (according to which you can end up in jail for two weeks for "unauthorised installation of tents"). By he way, do you know what "titushki" are? You can see them tagging along with the police and firing live rounds at the protesters. In front of the police for god's sake?!

Again, I do not support the violence, but not everything is as simple as it seems.

 

Putin’s inferno

The West must take a tough stand with the government of Ukraine—and with Russia’s leader

CIVIL strife often follows a grimly predictable pattern. What at first seems a soluble dispute hardens into conflict, as goals become more radical, bitterness accumulates and the chance to broker a compromise is lost. Such has been the awful trajectory of Ukraine, where protests that began peacefully in November have combusted in grotesque violence. The centre of Kiev, one of Europe’s great capital cities, this week became a choking war zone. Buildings and barricades were incinerated and dozens of Ukrainians were killed.

Despite talk of a truce between some of the participants, the horror could yet get much worse. The bloodshed will deepen the rifts in what has always been a fragile, complex country. Outright civil war remains a realistic prospect. Immediate responsibility for this mayhem lies with Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s thuggish president. But its ultimate architect sits in the Kremlin: Vladimir Putin.

The territory that is now Ukraine has a long and painful history as a bloody borderland between East and West. But it came into being as an independent nation only in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Combining lands in the west that had once been part of Austria-Hungary, and a Russian-speaking south and east, the new country always had its doubters. Since then Ukraine’s politics have been characterised by infighting and graft—including in the years following the orange revolution of 2004, a peaceful uprising whose promise was squandered by its rancorous leaders. Many Ukrainians feel their state has been captured by a corrupt elite, which cannot be dislodged by the usual democratic means. Kiev is one of the few European cities where the European Union is synonymous with good government and the rule of law.

It was Mr Yanukovych’s rejection, in November, of a trade agreement with the EU, in favour of an opaque deal with Russia, which started the unrest. Soon the protesters were demanding his resignation, while Mr Yanukovych and Russian propaganda denounced them as terrorists. How, after three months of tetchy stand-off, the killing started this week is murky. But most of it was perpetrated by the president’s men.

The response from the West should be firm. The president’s henchmen deserve the visa bans and asset freezes that America has imposed and the EU is considering. Mr Yanukovych must rein in his troops and, if he can, the plainclothes goons who are committing much of the violence. But the protesters, if they want to stop a full-scale blood-bath, also need to compromise—to quit their symbolic base in Kiev’s Independence Square, and the other buildings they have occupied. The best option would be for the two sides to form a transitional coalition government.

A presidential election is due in 2015: it should happen this year instead, preferably without Mr Yanukovych. His regime has featured rampant cronyism, the persecution of his rivals, suborning of the media and nobbling of the courts, now topped off by slaughter. But he will be hard to move. Built like a bouncer, he twists like a weasel; he is likely to try to wriggle out of any commitments he makes when he thinks the crisis has passed. If so, the tycoons who have sustained his power, and who have much to lose in this madness, must force him out.


What should come next is less clear. Virtually all of Ukraine’s established politicians have discredited themselves, including Yulia Tymoshenko, the jailed opposition leader. The protesters have no clear champion—one reason the violence may prove difficult to stop. It is hard to envisage a candidate emerging who will bridge the underlying fault-lines in Ukrainian society. Mr Yanukovych still commands support in the east and south; in Kiev and the west, where protesters have seized government facilities, he is reviled. A split remains terrifyingly plausible. Avoiding that fate requires, above all, an end to the Russian meddling. Mr Putin may not have lit the match this week, but he assembled the pyre.

To most rational observers, fomenting chaos across the border in Ukraine might seem an odd ambition for Russia. Not to Mr Putin, who regards Ukraine as an integral part of Russia’s sphere of influence, and saw the orange revolution as a Western plot to steal it. His economic sanctions and threats helped to persuade Mr Yanukovych to turn his back on the EU. It is clear that the loans and cheap Russian gas that prop up Ukraine’s teetering economy are conditional on Mr Yanukovych taking a tough line with the protesters. Mr Putin’s bullying and machinations have brought Ukraine to this pass.

If Mr Yanukovych clings on, weakened at home and ostracised abroad, Mr Putin will be content, for he will have another dependent leader to add to his collection of pliable clients. But he might not stop there. Russian hawks have long wanted to annex Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula that Nikita Khrushchev transferred to Ukraine (reputedly while drunk). This upheaval could provide a pretext for Mr Putin to grab it. Either way, a wretched Ukraine will help convince his people that street protests, and political competition, are the road to ruin.

Confronting the Kremlin

It is past time for the West to stand up to this gangsterism. Confronting a country that has the spoiling power of a seat on the UN Security Council, huge hydrocarbon reserves and lots of nuclear weapons, is difficult, but it has to be done. At a minimum, the diplomatic pretence that Russia is a law-abiding democracy should end. It should be ejected from the G8. Above all, the West must stand united in telling Mr Putin that Ukraine, and the other former Soviet countries that he regards as wayward parts of his patrimony, are sovereign nations.

There is a kind of rough justice in the timing of Ukraine’s turmoil. In 2008 Russia invaded Georgia, its tiny southern neighbour, just as the Olympic games began in Beijing, prompting formulaic Western protests but no meaningful retribution. The events in Kiev interrupted the winter Olympics in Sochi, intended to be a two-week carnival of Putinism. This time the West must make Mr Putin see that, with this havoc at the heart of Europe, he has gone too far.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21596941-west-must-take-tough-stand-government-ukraineand-russias-leader-putins

 

What I see is that you equate Reuters and the AP with "sources" that clearly are pushing an agenda...

 

2014

[video=youtube;e9cVi8oZw58]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9cVi8oZw58[/video]

1984

https://myspace.com/portretigalstuk/music/song/-dream-live-4313177-4291511?play=1

 

The UN is a forum for nations, not a nation itself. Russia is still on its Security Council, which means it can veto any activity the UN membership calls for.

 

At several times during the ongoing negotiations the Colonies were having with the British Parliament during the ARW the idea of offering the Colonies full representation was brought up. The American negotiators were instructed that this was unacceptable under any circumstances. One reason for this might have been that the average British subject in Britain paid up to 25x the taxes the Americans did. The main objective of the Americans was not to pay any taxes to Britain at all, as Britain was using taxes, (called tariffs, but actually just taxes on imports and exports) to control American trade. Look up Mercantilism. The British Parliament was also very corrupt. Wealthy men bought seats in Parliament quite openly. Look up Rotten Boroughs

 

Why not let the Ukrainians have a referendum on their future? Let them decide on economic union with Russia or the EU.

 

A referendum would be an exercise in futility given that the US is orchestrating and fomenting the chaos and instability:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37713.htm

 

Our economies are too interdependent on each other for another major war to break out in Europe or Eurasia for that matter, though there have been a few exceptions to the the golden arches peace theory (since updated to Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention) EG during the Russian invasion of Georgia, but like all of the exceptions to his particular theory, that was an extremely limited war, how many months did it last? It amounted to little more than a border skirmish relatively speaking.

 

The policies pursued by Washington, Berlin and Brussels in Ukraine, with the support of their right-wing and fascist allies, risk civil war and increase the danger of a military confrontation with Russia. Any domestic support for the corrupt and bankrupt Yanukovych regime, which represents a different faction of the oligarchs backing the opposition, is not the answer for the people of Ukraine, not least because all of them agree when it comes to the looting of public property and the impoverishment and suppression of the working population.

 

Holy hyperbole batman, the same "fascist" epitaphs against the protesters being thrown around today are the very same that were being thrown around against the ppposition back during the Orange Revolution, Svoboda is a minority party and not in coalition with any other major party, they are the fringe and not representative of the majority of the opposition which supports entrance into the EU, an entrance supported by a large plurality if not an outright majority of the Ukrainian citizenry.

Wait what? Yanukovych isn't the opposition he is the opposed.

What do YOU think the answer for them is?